Academics, being a privileged and rarefied lot, almost by second nature consistently look down the field.

Hey, it's what one is supposed to do when one has lifetime job security and is freed of many of the burdens that occupy most others in the American workforce.

For the above reasons, and others, academics tend to see things others don't. Case in point: the slumping stock market, the U.S. recession, and decidedly less-cash-flush credit markets.

In what an attorney calls a story of "anger, betrayal and cover-up," we are learning that former American International Group (NYSE: AIG) CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg may have taken $4.3 billion in stock from the company in 2005.

This "withdrawal" reportedly occurred shortly after Greenberg was forced out of the company as he was being investigated for accounting irregularities. Attorney Theodore Wells told a jury in Manhattan yesterday that Greenberg "was mad. He was angry," deciding to give the okay to tens of millions of shares being sold from a trust fund shortly after being jettisoned from the company. The fund was put together to provide incentive bonuses to a group of AIG management and employees that they would receive when they retired.

I've got bad news for the 30,000 participants in Dell's (NASDAQ: DELL) $1.6 billion 401(k) plan. They're going to have to work another ten years to earn up to $202,000 in lost retirement savings, compared to the participants in the top-rated plan in its peer group.

Dell's plan isn't all that bad. It's about average.

It took me ten seconds to get this information. How did I do it?

This post is part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst in Money 2008 feature.

Consumers took it in the chin so many times this year, it's surprising many of us are still standing. Consumer credit for student loans, mortgages, car loans and just about everything else dried up completely by October. Oil prices soared, drained our pocketbooks, and then dropped like a stone after doing the damage. Food prices continue to soar as the prices for our homes and the value of our retirement funds plummet. So how does one decide, which is the most disturbing consumer trend? Let's look at our top four picks, presented in alphabetical order.

Americans with good credit struggling to get loans at favorable rates
While rates are starting to come down thanks to the latest bailout by the Fed, good deals are hard to find. Most banks are hoarding their cash and only lending it out to those with credit scores over 760. Even then, rates are not that favorable. You can only think about applying for a mortgage or equity line if you have at least 90 percent equity in a home that has probably lost value and, in most cases, you must have 80 percent equity to get a home loan. How can the U.S. stop the downward spiral in home values until credit is available for qualified buyers?

Welcome to Way Off Wall Street, a column dedicated to providing Main Street opinions on topics of interest to investors. Each installment highlights the views of Americans who are far removed from the canyons of Wall Street -- and who often see things more clearly as a result.

This is the second part of a two part report in which I have examined current retirement attitudes. In Part One, I revealed some of the current thoughts and concerns that were expressed to me by people who are already retired, and by people who expect to retire within the next five years. In Part Two, I present the thoughts and attitudes of people who expect to retire more than ten years from now, and people who believe that the concept of a traditional, full retirement cannot be applied to their lives.

When examining the attitudes of people who will reach the retirement stage of life more than a decade from now, I found it difficult to form a well-rounded picture. I had expected that I would encounter numerous strategies and "secret formulas" for retirement success. However, what I actually encountered was a vast swamp of bewilderment, misinformation, and noncommittal apathy. I'm still rather stunned by it. These are people generally ranging in age from 45 to 60. I find it quite distressing that most of these people don't have a solid grasp on their own retirement planning. An article presented by redwoodage.com quotes Peter Smyth, executive vice president of The Hartford's International Markets, as stating: "The overall level of financial preparedness globally remains low and is deteriorating."

Most of these distant retirees seem totally blind to their own retirement financing. They complain that it's going to be difficult and expensive, but then they defer the responsibilities of their future financial security to employer-provided savings plans and government entitlement programs, including Social Security. Rare was the person I found who was involved in creating their own independent retirement nest egg. Additionally, I never expected to encounter such a stark contrast between this group and the people who are only about ten years older than they are.

Of this distant retirement group, those people who are actually taking an active hand in planning for their own financial futures seemed to favor two particular strategies. The first strategy encompasses those people who have engaged a professional financial planner for guidance in retirement planning and those who are utilizing their own skills and knowledge to actively develop a retirement portfolio on their own. The second active planning strategy is generally defined by a slow, and sometimes questionable, accumulation of tangible assets.

While researching opinions for a column I'm writing about people's current retirement attitudes, I've been led to one particularly important question: what would I myself do if I had money to invest for retirement?

The first part of my answer is simple. I have a fairly well performing 401k account through my employer and I stick as much money in that account as I can stand. But what if I had excess funds which I wanted to put into safe haven for the future, what would I do right now? At this point, I believe the option I would use is Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS).

You must understand that I hate bonds. I hate them because I think that they're typically very lazy. They generally pay low rates of return and they sometimes lack liquidity. However, with today's extreme investment volatility, I have come to recognize the intrinsic wisdom of government backed bonds. The nice thing about TIPS is that they come with inflation protection built right in.

I did a little research, and I found a short discussion about TIPS funds at CNN Money.com. The article mentions a TIPS fund which is managed by Vanguard, a name which I place a fairly high degree of trust in. The article indicates that the Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities Fund (VIPSX) has an acceptable rate of return and low operating fees. If I had a large sum of cash which I just wanted to place in a save haven until this bear market runs its course, I believe that this Vanguard fund might be one of my first choices.

Welcome to Way Off Wall Street, a column dedicated to providing Main Street opinions on topics of interest to investors. Each installment highlights the views of Americans who are far removed from the canyons of Wall Street -- and who often see things more clearly as a result.

I've spent a good deal of time researching and soliciting opinions about how people are looking at their own retirement in relation to the American economic downturn. Many people are looking at retirement with the same mind-set that they've always had. In many cases, I found people believe that our economy will recover rather quickly. In others, I suspected they are intentionally blinding themselves from the truth that this could be a very long economic downturn.

Since today's retirement realities is such a big topic, I'm going to discuss it over two posts. This first one concerns the group of people who either have already retired, or expect to retire within the next five years. My next column will cover people who have more than five years until retirement, as well as those people who believe that the word "retirement" will never truly apply to them (I myself fall into the latter part of the second group).

On a day when the Dow Jones industrial average closed down 400 points, you may be asking yourself, 'What can I do to make myself feel better about this?'

Charles Schwab Corp. (NASDAQ: SCHW) has an idea for you: Invest more for your retirement.

Here's how the logic goes, and I agree with it (even though, of course, it is good marketing for Schwab to promulgate such ideas).

The discount broker has found in surveys that most people (63%) say they sleep better at night when they are saving for retirement, yet many people save very little for retirement each year. They also found that people save for vacation or household items before they max out their retirement plans. And most people are positively drowning in credit card debt, probably because they made those purchases and took those vacations before they'd actually saved the money (that's my sophisticated analysis there, not survey results).

This post is a follow-up to an earlier post by retirement expert Dan Solin on what you should do with your imploding 401(k) plan.

If you are retiring in ten year or less, I can understand how worried you are about the value of your 401(k) investments. Many employees tell me they can't bear to look at their statements.

Here's what to do if you are going to depend on your 401(k) for living expenses when you retire.

In the investing world, ten years is a long time horizon.

I looked at 481 monthly rolling ten year periods over fifty years, from January, 1958 to December, 2007. If you were fully invested in a globally diversified portfolio of stocks during that time period, how many ten year periods do you think you would have had negative returns?

How about never!

The average annualized returns of this portfolio were over 13%. The lowest returns were still over 5%.

I appreciate that historical data is not predictive of future returns and it may well be that it is "different this time," but those are pretty impressive facts.

If you are persuaded by this data, the asset allocation of your 401(k) should have 70%-100% stocks with the balance in bonds.

As retirement nears, you will have to make adjustments to your asset allocation, because your tolerance for risk will diminish. Here are some good rules of thumb.

When you are seven years from retirement, reduce the stock portion of your 401(k) to 60% or less. The average annualized returns for this portfolio were in excess of 10%. The worst returns were in excess of 2%.

When you are five years from retirement, reduce the stock portion of your 401(k) to 35% or less. The average annualized returns for this portfolio were in excess of 8%. The worst returns were in excess of 3%.

If you have less than 4 years from retirement, you have a dilemma.

The only way to keep pace with inflation and taxes is to have some exposure to the stock market. Many pre-retirees and retirees are understandably concerned about market volatility. They invest in "risk-free" investments like insured CDs and Treasury Bills. These investments currently pay low interest rates, virtually guaranteeing a loss after inflation and taxes.

Many financial planners believe that pre-retirees and retirees should have at least 35% (or more) of their portfolios invested in stocks at all times.

If you follow this advice, remember that you may have to hold on during stomach-churning bear markets like the one we are currently experiencing.

Dan Solin is the author of The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books 2006) and The Smartest 401(k) Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books, June 24, 2008)

Start with a few speculative stocks. Add a distressed-debt corporate bond portfolio, and two quantitative-based hedge funds, and a momentum-based hedge fund for the British pound/Japanese yen currency pairing.

Sounds like a typical, assertive portfolio for a wealth management group or, perhaps, for an accredited investor.

But a public pension fund?

Public pension funds in the United States are increasing bets on high-risk hedge funds and real estate in an attempt to fill deficits in retirement plans and recover ground, due to the worst performance by pension funds in six years, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.

Public funds, which manage more than $2.45 trillion in assets, are trying to reverse losses averaging 5.5% for the year ended June 30, according to Merrill Lynch data, and stem the tide of deficits, Bloomberg News reported. The State of New York's comptroller is asking its Legislature to increase its alternative investment spending cap; in February, the State of South Carolina upped its alternate investment / private equity / real estate cap to 45% from 0%.

'Investment distortions of the very worst sort'

Economist Glen Langan told BloggingStocks Thursday he doesn't like the sound of the new stance by state / local governments, if the aforementioned represents a trend.

"I view it as another manifestation of the U.S. stock market slump," Langan said. "The underperformance of stocks and the drive for outsized return on equity is leading to investment distortions of the very worst sort. We saw this in the mortgage market with their securities. It got to a point that if the interest rate was high enough, banks made the loan. We've seen it in oil, where the unattractiveness of stocks led institutions to dive into oil futures, driving up prices well above historic gains. And now it looks like public pension funds are catching the bug or flu."

This post is part of a series where personal finance expert Dan Solin looks at money moves that may seem smart in tough economic times, but are actually quite dumb. See all 12.

Rising gas and food prices, the disappearance of home equity, downsizing by large and small employers and a credit crunch are a perfect storm for cash-strapped investors. Many are tempted to tap into low-hanging fruit: their 401(k) and 403(b) plans.

Is this a good idea?

Other than as a last resort, this answer is "no."

Even in good times, the number of employees who cash out of their retirement plans is alarming. More than 45% of departing employees cash out of their 401(k) plans.

The consequences of doing so are draconian.

This post is part of a series where personal finance expert Dan Solin looks at money moves that may seem smart in tough economic times, but are actually quite dumb. See all 12.

It is a tough time for participants in 401(k) plans. They dread opening their statements and seeing their declining account balances.

Is this the right time to move your 401(k) funds into more conservative investments?

The answer is a resounding "no"!

Your 401(k) plan is intended to fund your retirement. You cannot access it without penalty before age 59 1/2. By definition, for most employees, it is a long-term investment.

By switching into a portfolio that is too conservative, you are compounding the problems inherent in a system that is already rigged against you. Most 401(k) plans charge excessive, indefensible fees and have poor, under-performing, investment options. The primary beneficiaries of these plans are employers (who offload the cost and responsibility for securing the retirement of their employees) and the mutual fund industry (which gouges the $6 trillion in assets in these plans with unconscionable fees and expenses).

This post is part of a series where retirement expert Dan Solin offers simple answers to the ten toughest retirement questions. See all 10.

Q: How should I proceed to withdraw funds I need in retirement?

A: Once you have retired and need to start tapping into your retirement savings, you have a number of options to consider.

You can take a periodic or lump sum check from your 401(k) or similar plan. Or you can rollover your plan into a traditional or a Roth IRA or into an annuity. Each of these options has tax consequences which you should discuss with your tax advisor.

The first place you should look when considering where to start taking withdrawals is the account that will trigger the least taxes.

For example, withdrawals from your Roth IRA will be tax free because you invested with after-tax dollars. While you are still in a higher tax bracket, withdrawing money from your Roth IRA or other non-taxable assets is sound financial planning.

This post is part of a series where retirement expert Dan Solin offers simple answers to the ten toughest retirement questions. See all 10.

Q: What If I need to borrow from my 401(k) plan in an emergency?

A: The maximum you can borrow from your 401(k) plan is 50% of the amount vested, up to a maximum of $50,000 in any rolling 12 month period.

Your employer may place additional restrictions on your ability to borrow from your 401(k).

Whether or not you are permitted to take a 401(k) loan, it's generally a bad idea.

During the repayment period, there is less money in your account. If the market increases in value, your returns will be diminished.

If you leave your job, you will have to pay back the full amount of the loan. If you cannot repay the loan as required by IRS guidelines, then the loan will be treated as taxable income and a 10% penalty will be accessed.

If you have no other options, you should consider a loan from your 401(k). But it should be a last resort.

Dan Solin is the author of The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books 2006) and The Smartest 401(k) Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books, June 24, 2008)

This post is part of a series where retirement expert Dan Solin offers simple answers to the ten toughest retirement questions. See all 10.

Q: Should I invest in annuities in my retirement plan?

A: Annuities within a retirement plan are a poor choice.

The big selling point of annuities is that they provide for a tax deferral. However, all investments within retirement plans are already tax deferred. You are paying a premium for a benefit you already have.

Annuities are high commission, high cost, investments, laden with excessive fees and expenses. They usually have stiff penalties for early withdrawals. These issues make annuities an unsuitable investment for most investors even outside of a retirement plan.

The much hyped "death benefit" does not change my opinion. It only kicks in if the value of your investments is less that the amount invested. How likely is it that this will be the case over any extended period of time?

Remember, an annuity within or outside a retirement plan will subject you to tax at ordinary income rates when you withdraw funds from it.

Giving up the historically more favorable capital gains rate is not something that should be done lightly. For the majority of investors, annuities make no sense.

You would be far better off in a globally diversified portfolio of low cost index funds or in a Target Retirement Fund.

Dan Solin is the author of The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books 2006) and The Smartest 401(k) Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books, June 24, 2008)